July 17, 2008 -- The Library of Congress joined representatives from 25 states in Helena, MT in May 2008 at the third annual Best Practices Exchange Conference (external link). BPX is an unconventional conference. Attendees are encouraged to present projects and experiences, successes, failures and lessons learned in a collaborative, informal atmosphere.
The conference sessions covered five broad tracks related to digital information in the government environment: identification and acquisition; description; discovery and access; collection management and preservation; and project management. The separate tracks allowed attendees to concentrate their energies on areas of interest, while allowing most participants the opportunity to present on their activities.
Keynote speaker Roy Tennant, Senior Program Manager at OCLC, gave his opening-night presentation in the Old Supreme Court Chambers of the Montana Capitol. The historic venue belied his message as he spoke about the special challenges facing information professionals in the uncertain digital future.
The Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program was represented by a pair of presentations, one focusing on the current content transfer activities at the Library, the other engaging representatives from the GeoMAPP multistate project in a discussion on their project efforts and goals.
Conference presentations are available at http://www.bpexchange.org/2008/presentations_chron.php (external link)
